This was addressed by RFK recently.

1) Most of the measles cases are in Texas, among their large Amish and Mennonite population. These people avoid vaccinations for religious reasons.

2) The number of measles cases is roughly 800, but the number of new cases has leveled off. The number of cases doesn't appear to be growing in the manner of an epidemic.

3) Canada has about as many cases, but with 1/8 the population of the US.

4) Other countries are seeing a rise in measles cases, and are doing less well than the US.

The US is apparently in good shape as far as measles go. Yes, it's a concern, but not much of a concern and it isn't expected to become a problem.

In comparison, the US has epidemics of obesity, childhood diabetes, and autism. These three are the elephants in the room, with autism rising to about 3% (one in 30) of boys, and 5% (1-in-20) in California. The rise in autism has been shown (by study) *not* to be due to changes in diagnosis method or access to medical professionals.

Since 2000, the incidence of childhood diabetes has tripled.

Measles is a concern, but for the three epidemics we *actually* have the MSM is strangely silent.

Almost as if reporting on the health of the US isn't really their goal...

The US estimated that the China's great firewall employs 50,000 people.

With that assumption, you might reasonably conclude that a few of those 50,000 lurk on slashdot and try to direct the conversation in the comments section. It wouldn't take much, a single person could reasonably read all story posts and watch over the comments section.

Much of the analysis could be done by AI, so that no one has to pay attention... just wait for the AI to pop up an alert, verify by hand, and address the issue.

I would also assume that they have banks of automated slashdot logins, so that whenever something comes up that they don't like they can find a login that has mod points.

And perhaps several tiers of responders, so that the "no it isn't" response can be entered by a low-level employee with limited understanding of English, and perhaps a more nuanced fluent speaker for some of the more insightful posts.

And also, perhaps they have files on the individual commenters here, so that they can try out different techniques and see which ones tend to get the commenter angry. Has anyone noticed that responses to their posts have a sort of "tide" to them, where there will be a time period where everyone just contradicts, then a time period where people insult, then a time period where they all say that you (the commenter) aren't qualified? Perhaps they are searching for the correct way to get you so pissed off and leave slashdot.

I know, probably a conspiracy theory, but it doesn't take much of an imagination to visualize what resources *might* be used against various sources on the internet. I mean, if *you* were one of these people, what automated systems would you use to amplify the effective reach of your message?

Anyway, just a thought. Maybe foreign actors are inserting politically charged opinions here just to give the appearance of infighting and to goad people into anger.

(And as a thought problem, if you had access to Slashdot's internal system, what metrics would you use to detect various forms of system abuse?)

We did an experiment in psych class where a student volunteer agreed to wear glasses w/prisms that turned his vision upside down. He reported that it was very confusing at first, but after 3 days his brain figured things out and flipped his vision around so that he "saw" it as normal.

Then at the next class he stopped wearing the glasses and once again everything seemed upside down until his brain figured things out and flipped his vision around once more.

A similar experiment uses prisms that angle everything in by 10 degrees. After several days the professor tells the student to close his eyes, take off the glasses, then open his eyes and try to hit his (the professor's) outstretched hand, and hilarity ensues. The student's vision goes back to normal a few days later.

This is explained by the visual cortex learning and rewiring itself to accommodate the changes in vision. People with spot defects in their vision can train their system to ignore the defects, and an experimental set of glasses from NASA mapped the complete vision input around the spot of a macular degeneration patient. The entire visual input was presented to the patient, but the input had to be "stretched" around the hole in his vision. After several days, the patient reported seeing the stretched/mapped input as normal.

So I'm curious: why do you think the brain can't be rewired, and why is any mention of this is bullshit?

(And yes, there are rewiring techniques for other conditions, such as certain forms of depression and phobias. Heck, brainwashing is a form of brain rewiring, and we know how that works and how to use it.)

Slashdot used to be a place where people could post expert knowledge and insight into a topic, and voice different opinions on controversial subjects.

I'm going to take a chance and try to add some insight from "the other side" and maybe we can have some intellectual discussion. Or if not, if everything Trump does is bad in the worst possible way it is to be bad, then I'll get modded down.

There's a thing in economics called the Marshal Lerner condition, and much of what Trump is doing economically appears to be aimed at manipulating this condition to the benefit of the US. It's an interesting read, from the game theory point of view.

The economy is a wildly complex system with multiple "elasticities" holding all the pieces together, so that if you put stress on one aspect, other aspects will strain or relax to compensate.

Just about nothing in the news media takes this into effect, all the descriptions I've seen have been justifications after the fact, and not actual economic analysis.

If you raise tariffs then importers will have to pay more, so they will charge more, and prices will go up. This is only true when everything else is held constant. In the current situation everything else isn't held constant, the system has numerous elasticities, and things will compensate.

For example, as of last night 50 countries had contacted the US to negotiate trade deals (EU being one of them, representing 27 countries for one contact). This is an elasticity that got pulled taught when the tariffs went into effect. This was the expected outcome, Trump said as much in the weeks leading up to the tariffs.

Furthermore, everyone and their dog has said that the unfair tariff structure was a problem for many decades. For example, Nancy Pelosi in 1996 gave a lecture to congress about the problem, and we've let the problem get progressively worse over the past 30 years.

Given that there is some economic analysis that unfair trade is hurting the country, and given that high-level democrats used to believe that it was a problem as well, I'm of the opinion that the machinations of the current administration are a good thing.

It appears that all of the resistance to fixing this problem is because it's Trump that's doing it, and that fixing the problem in this same manner would be OK if it were the Democrats doing it.

I'm in favor these actions for this one specific issue, and for right now. In three months time I'll reevaluate my opinion, but additionally I don't think it'll take even that long - I expect the whole thing will be over in a month and then the US will be in a much better position.

No insults, no innuendo, just some objective analysis derived from searching the issue and listening to both sides.

(There are other actions taken by this administration that I'm wildly against, just not this one.)

A friend of mine put himself on the market every two years whether he wanted a job or not. In retrospect, I feel that was the most insightful and logical decision to be made at the time. As he pointed out, "nothing might come from it, but if they offer me my dream job there's no way I wouldn't take it".

IIRC, he had some rule about not taking a new job unless it paid more than 15% higher than his current job, or some such.

A further consideration is what you do *while* in your job. Always be looking for your next job, but that can also be within the same company. Talk to people at other departments, get a feel for what they do, listen in on a few staff meetings, and maybe volunteer to do some task or other that they are struggling with.

In other words, be curious and don't be afraid to learn new things.

When your department gets cut, lots of times you can switch to a different department. If you have shown that you understand the job requirements and get a recommendation from other people in that department, the company doesn't have to spend all the money needed to interview people.

I started in the OS division, then switched to Networking, then switched to compilers, then became a consultant. Switching allowed me to keep my job for several more years than would have been otherwise possible, and having a background in multiple disciplines was useful in finding jobs at other companies.

You're not actually working for the company, you're working for *yourself*. Lots of people don't understand this, the company can and will "unhire" you for any reason, or no reason. It might not even be your fault.

Always be on the lookout for your next job. You take care of yourself.

(And needless to say you don't go around trumpeting that opinion at the company. You can still have loyalty and still expect to continue working, but just know that your ultimate allegiance is to yourself.)

For a 2nd point of reference, I note that in the run up to the 2016 election his *reasoning* for his predictions was based on historical trends.

Before the party conventions he predicted Marco Rubio to be the candidate, because historically the position Marco held had been the candidate in many previous elections.

That's a basic fallacy. The "Baltimore Stockbroker" is more than a scam, it's a fallacy that we should watching for in our daily lives. It comes up in finance whenever you hear "this guy predicted the past 5 stock market crashes, and for $10 you can get his book where he predicts the next one". (Compare with the number of people trying to hawk a book on the stock market, the number of published measurements of the stock market (around 200, AFAIK), and the probability that one of these correlates with the stock market crashes of the past.)

Nate Silver is someone with a deep understanding of the mathematics of statistics, but not the fundamental premises on which those statistics are based; IOW, he didn't recognize that the base situation had changed, so that his statistics turned out to be measuring the wrong thing.

In the run up to the 2016 election the online betting pools swing away from Nate's predictions, it's the equivalent of multiple people trying to guess the number of beans in a large jar at a carnival (the average guess is astonishingly accurate). The betting pools were accurate, and all the polling, as it happens, were not.

Furthermore, polling has become tainted by political pressure. If the polls show one candidate comfortably in the lead, no one feels the need to donate to the campaign. If the polling shows the candidates locked in a race too tight to predict, then OMG we better send them some money or else the wrong lizard will get elected. Polls are now a mechanism for encouraging campaign donations.

Nate didn't realize that the assumptions on which his math was based had changed.

I think the same thing happened in the 2024 election.

People forget, the ISS was controversial at the time it was built, with many scientists complaining that very little science would result and that the enormous expense would detract from other space missions that they felt would be more productive.

About $100 billion to build, and about $4 billion for maintenance, and it's now very old.

For comparison, the mars rover cost about $1 billion. The asteroid probes cost about $1 billion (each). The James Webb telescope cost about $10 billion.

For the cost of maintenance, we could launch 4 probes *each year* to interesting celestial bodies, and maybe develop a reliable method of nudging asteroids out of a collision course with Earth (google search: NASA Dart mission).

There is little scientific interest in keeping it around? Why is accelerating the EOL so controversial?

Slashdot used to be a place where people would post facts supporting one side or the other, and it was the place to go to see both sides of an argument.

Nowadays it's all about dumping on the emotional aspects of why people make decisions. There's *no* analysis of whether it is/was the right decision, only whether it could be framed as childish and petty.

Slashdot is no longer a place where you can find both sides of an argument.

I'm all for climate change and such, but can we eat first?

Climate change is the responsibility of the superpowers. It's things like Commonwealth Fusion and Verdox that will generate solutions that will allow us to reverse climate change.

(Even 10 years ago the best method for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere was by distillation, which was/is energy intensive. I've done a fair bit of gas chemistry in my career and was surprised when the Verdox system was announced publicly.)

Climate change will not come from reducing our standard of living... that's a zero--sum game which will never be enough, and will erode our lifespans and general well-being.

Climate change will be solved by coming up with new solutions that work directly to fix the problem, and those new solutions will come from countries that have a standard of living high enough that they don't have to worry about where their next meal comes from, so they can turn their attention to other matters.

Malaysia is building data centers? Go for it.

Get your economy in order, get your standard of living up, and join the rest of the world in coming up with solutions for climate change.

(5.6 percent of Malaysian households live in absolute poverty, up to 8.4 percent of households with children (source).)

An hour of video is roughly 1GB, so one drive can store roughly 100,000 hours of video.

Hypothetically, a person wearing a system containing one of these drives could record roughly 4 hours a day for 60 years. Assuming that most of the (awake) time we spend in our daily lives is unremarkable and not worth recording, one could make the claim that one of these drives could record a single person's entire lifetime. All the interactions you have, everything that everyone else says (including all the school lessons you receive), everyone you meet, all the books and articles and papers you read - everything significant in your lifetime could be recorded on one drive.

Add an AI indexing system and you can have a quick index of your entire life.

(And apropos this system, you could replay traumatic events, and this would help you get over the trauma. Or play the events to a trusted medical professional and get advice, and so on.)

Secondly, one problem with app installation (on linux, I don't know how bad it is on other systems) is access to shared libraries of various revision and date. Compatibility has become a nightmare, and we now have to deal with multiple installation systems as well (apt-get, pip-install, CPAN, and so on). I've been in installation hell several times on my linux system, trying to get some bespoke configuration of library versions just to get some standard installed application to run. It's not fun.

With large amounts of storage and fast internet, we might as well build apps with statically-compiled libraries (flatpaks and such) and just not have to worry about library versioning. This would also make supply chain compromising a little harder, since when a bad library is discovered it only affects certain compiled apps (which will be recompiled), and not have been blindly downloaded by all users during system update.

I can see a lot of uses for large hard drives.

I'm surprised.

The purchase was set up by the Biden administration. The current administration has said they have no plans on fulfilling the order.

But don't take my word for it, check out the media reports that say it was Trump (not Biden) aiming to purchase the cybertrucks, because fake news saying it was Trump instead of Biden makes it seem so much like graft.

Then again, I'm on the right so maybe I'm in denial.

Rather than attack the man, let's discuss the position.

About 2 years ago all the AI systems were closed source, and there were three of them.

Then LLAMA was leaked online, and ten years of improvement happened in the next six months. People published paper after paper describing what they could do with the LLM, using it in innovative ways that no one had thought of.

As was pointed out, Meta (who developed LLAMA) simply didn't have the manpower to explore all the interesting aspects of the system.

So in retrospect, losing control of LLAMA was a good thing for AI development.

So it would seem that having AI be open source is a good idea.

Do you disagree?

Or is the fact that it's put forward by an evil person somehow relevant?

Which questions would those be?

I'm not a big fan of fear and uncertainty. What ethical or moral questiont specifically should be asked in this situation?

In my career I had one big ethical rule, which was that I wouldn't work on weapons. I figured everything else was OK and advancing technology would raise the standard of living and promote wealth across the globe.

(This was before spam, hacking, and enshittification generally. Yes, this was before the first spamming of usenet by a couple of lawyers who felt it was their first amendment right to put an advert for their services across every usenet topic.)

AI seems to be the wave of the future, it might be dangerous, so I'm looking around for moral guidance.

So... apropos of your post, what questions should we be asking?

One thing that's become stark these last few days is the abysmal reporting on political issues.

I'll bet there's another side to the story, one that we're not seeing. "increased competition, delays and a changing market. "Naturally we also take regulatory context into consideration,"" sounds like the Trump freeze wasn't the direct cause, but a convenient excuse for a reporter to blame Trump for something that Shell wanted to do anyway.

Anyone have deeper knowledge of the issue?

The EO mentions this:

Sounds like these particular offshore projects were illegal and maybe damaging to the environment, and the BLM complained about it.

Sounds a lot like the government stepped in and prevented a bunch of ecological damage.

Anyone have deeper knowledge of the issue?

Cue all the responses that show how *of course* this Trump's fault because we all know what he's thinking.

I totally read that in a way that you probably didn't mean.

I think.

Did you mean to use the scare quotes?